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This paper aims to contribute to the literature and practice on beginning principal socialization by identifying the features of post‐industrial work that create a more complex work environment for the practice and learning of the principalship in the USA.

Based on recent literature on the changing nature of work, the paper applies those features of complexity to components of beginning principal socialization.

The nature of work in post‐industrial society and the changes in education, including a knowledge society, technology, demographic changes, and public accountability increase the complexity for US school principals. These features provide an important conceptual and normative basis for understanding and changing the content, sources, methods, and outcomes of beginning principal socialization.

The paper contributes a set of conceptual and normative features that strengthens the understanding of how beginning principals learn the role.

While school reform literature calls attention to incentives for teachers, little research or policy making has focused on school administrators′ incentives. Career incentives perceived by a sample of elementary school principals and the influence of career background on those incentives are examined. It was found, using both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, that principals perceive their career as having economic, ancillary and task‐related rewards. However, principals varied in the kinds of incentives they preferred and the nature of their future goals. Principals who have moved among several school districts in their administrative careers are more likely to be satisfied and to emphasise incentives, such as contact with school constituencies, which come from staying in the principalship. In contrast, principals who have remained in the same district throughout their administrative careers are more likely to prefer those incentives which advancement to central office can offer.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the current conversation on and research into the potential use of technology as a means of transforming mentoring processes and those engaged in them. The authors examine the manner in which technology is being integrated into mentoring endeavors and the advantages and disadvantages of this tool, arguing that the particular attributes of e-mentoring make it an ideal platform for enhancing mentoring processes and outcomes through the use of new mentoring perspectives. They describe a specific mentoring perspective that could be adopted as a means of critically examining some of the opportunities and challenges of using technology as a tool for transformational mentoring, with an emphasis on mentoring in educational environments.

This conceptual paper uses a constructionist perspective to mentoring as a lens to examine how technology influences the mentoring process and investigates the implications of transformational e-mentoring for educational professionals.

The paper contends that e-mentoring may extend mentoring's horizons to include increasingly broad and diverse constellations of mentors for protégés. With proper guidance, the relationships made possible through e-mentoring can fulfill many mentoring functions and transform both mentors and protégés as they learn from one other.

Other than descriptions of mentoring programs that use technological tools, very little research on the outcomes of e-mentoring is available. The paper calls for a greater focus on the outcomes of e-mentoring in future research.

The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of e-mentoring, presents recommendations for using new technologies to enhance mentoring programs in education and argues for the need to reconsider the purposes and structures of such programs.

The paper lays the groundwork for a better understanding of technology's role in mentoring in today's complex, rapidly changing knowledge society.

Institutions which train potential administrators are confronted with how best to help them conceive their new role in a way that supports school reform. Reports on study of candidates in a non‐traditional principal preparation programme in order to examine the socialization process of developing an innovative role conception. Candidates completed a questionnaire on entry to the programme and were interviewed at the end of the programme. Findings are reported in terms of sources and definitions of role conception, as well as socialization mechanisms. Candidates encountered conflict between the role conception emphasized by the university and that of the school system in terms of whether they stressed present reality or future change. During the course of the programme, the sense of facilitating teachers gave way to a sense of the principal′s autonomy in creating a vision and persuading others to buy into that vision. Provides implications for training principals and for future research.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.